Chicago

On December 4, 2024, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) released its enforcement results for Fiscal Year 2024 (“FY 2024”), showcasing record awards of monetary relief totaling more than $17.2 billion.The historic awards reflect the agency’s continued pursuit of misconduct charged in enforcement actions filed in FY 2023 in the digital asset space along with enforcement actions against traditional financial services firms and commodity trading houses. The CFTC’s FY 2024 robust enforcement efforts featured a focus on intermediaries, emphasizing the importance of proper registration and compliance by entities facilitating derivative transactions. Enforcement against repeat offenders intensified, reflecting a strategy of escalating penalties to deter recidivism and safeguard market integrity. Additionally, the agency expanded its attention to environmental fraud, bringing its first enforcement cases involving fraud in the voluntary carbon markets.

Last week, the National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel Jennifer A. Abruzzo (the “GC”) announced her position that “stay-or-pay” provisions in employment agreements are unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act (the “NLRA”). The GC also reiterated and built on an earlier memo in which she took the position that almost all non-competes are similarly unlawful under the NLRA because they infringe on “Section 7” rights (which include the right to union and engage in other “protected concerted activity”). Employers—even if “non-union”—should consider the following questions.

What does the future hold in the UK and the US for whistleblower protection and incentivisation?

Recently filed class action complaints allege that companies that utilize embedded trackers within emails, or “spy pixels” as the plaintiffs are calling them, violate Arizona law because they collect a “communication service record” without first obtaining the consumer’s consent.

Security, scale or functionality – pick two. This computer science principle coined by the late Professor Anderson is particularly relevant to the FemTech industry. Anderson’s Rule states that for a system to provide high functionality and security, its access may need to be limited (small scale); alternatively, offering high functionality on a larger scale, may require an acceptance of risk, e.g. of inadvertent or deliberate disclosure of information. In real life systems - including FemTech - a balance must be struck. It is no surprise, then, that the regulatory landscape for FemTech is complex and fragmented. Different jurisdictions approach the question of health/medical data in diverse ways and apply different laws and standards to the protection of personal data. All these rules are ultimately intended to mitigate the risks to personal data posed by large databases of sensitive personal information while facilitating the benefits. In part two of our series, we examine the UK, EU and US regulatory privacy landscapes and enforcement priorities and how they apply to the FemTech sector. For more, read our previous article "What is femtech and how can it meet the privacy needs of its users?".